By Kate Dillon
Alante portfolio company, Flyp, is on a mission to save $200 Billion+ worth of goods from ending up in landfills by using its AI-powered platform to enable millions of online re-sellers, and we’re proud to be helping them do it. Here’s why.
A sobering statistic: Every year 100 billion apparel products are made, and ~⅗ end up in landfills within 12 months,[1] costing the planet roughly 10% of global CO2 emissions. This is partly due to throwaway culture, partly due to the preponderance of e-commerce returns (which are not guaranteed to be simply restocked and resold - many go straight to landfill or incineration), and partly because the technical infrastructure hasn’t been here to mainstream and facilitate resale… it hasn’t been easy enough to sell.
Enter Flyp.
Flyp founders James Kawas and Dani Arnaout identified a critical gap between the massive amount of inventory and product waste in the apparel industry and the people who can sell it, so-called “power sellers” who are part of the exploding $15bn resale market.
Flyp developed the first and only platform that allows individual consumers and businesses to offload their pre owned items to online resellers who will sell it for them on marketplaces like eBay, Poshmark, Facebook and others for a commission. Think of Thredup or The RealReal, but instead of a centralized company doing the selling, it’s done by a network of thousands of small, stay-at-home (mostly women) online resellers.
The key to this platform is Flyp’s AI-enabled matching technology which uses Pro Seller's historical sales data to algorithmically match inventory with the Pro Seller who is the best fit to resell it. Flyp also provides a fully free automation suite that saves resellers 90% of the time needed for inventory management and sales management across channels.
By 2025, resale is projected to occupy 61% of the secondhand market, resulting in a total market value of $47 billion[2]. As this sector takes off, an emerging significant challenge is access to inventory, and Flyp’s unprecedented matchmaking and automated toolset has already succeeded in moving over 160 metric tons worth millions of dollars that would have ended in landfills, and is growing quickly at a 400% annual growth rate.
Using technology to accelerate a growth sector while avoiding environmental harm and creating inclusive access to circular business/consumption is at the heart of the Alante investment thesis. We invest where we see potential to move high-impact systems at scale, and resale enables individuals and brands to mitigate waste on their environmental, social, and financial balance sheets.
Flyp’s impact is fully visible and tangible in every transaction that occurs on the platform. Standardized metrics for circularity are evolving to meet the complexity and integrity of systems-level change, however we know that extending a product's lifecycle is a critical part of preserving its embodied energy, including GHG emissions, water, and labor.
For Alante, an important measure of circular impact is around sustained, inclusive engagement, and this is where Flyp’s model stands alone. The company is creating and supporting hundreds of thousands of circular economy jobs for small, stay-at-home entrepreneurs around the country, enabling them to generate millions of dollars in income. On the flip side (pun intended), Flyp provides millions of shoppers with affordable items at a massive discount from retail, creating access to the circular economy and a more sustainable lifestyle.
Flyp currently hosts 17,000 power seller businesses, 85% of whom use the platform every single day for an average of 5 hours a day. To date, the platform has saved 160 metric tonnes of garment waste from landfill and $1mn of goods are being upcycled via Flyp every month, and they are growing.
We are thrilled to be a part of their continued growth. Flyp just closed a $10M Series A. The round was led by an awesome emerging fund manager - Asymmetric Capital Partners, with strong participation from existing investors: NextView, Afore, Interlace, Alante Capital, 1517 and GroundUp, and new investors Gaingels and Tectonic. The round also saw the participation of strategic angel investors including Ryo Ishizuka, Co-Founder & CEO of Mercari.
Learn more about Flyp, and see news on their recent round here.